How ‘Nobody Wants This’ Stacked Its Ensemble
By all accounts, Nobody Wants This is a rom-com starring Kristen Bell, as Joanne, an agnostic, sex-and-relationship podcaster, and Adam Brody, as Noah, a laid-back Rabbi. And while their crackling chemistry is central to every critical rave, the larger ensemble — featuring Justine Lupe (Morgan), Timothy Simons (Sasha) and Jackie Tohn (Esther) — has become increasingly core to the hit formula.
Now, with the second season here, that supporting trio has considerably more real estate and emotional heft in season two than any one of them did in season one. Tohn, who was promoted to a series regular between seasons, suggests the show has been altogether career altering, and Lupe doesn’t disagree. “It’s a show about these two love interests and their romance, so I was shocked they were going to give so much to me,” she says, teary as she reflects on her second season load: “It’s not something I take lightly.”
But how did the five actors — an exceedingly close group, featured in this week’s THR cover story — find themselves in Netflix’s runaway hit? Creator Erin Foster and her stars tell all.
Bell will tell you she doesn’t read many scripts, but that’s primarily because very few pass her initial test. When considering a new project, Bell’s criteria is as follows:
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Once it was clear Nobody Wants This would pass said test, Bell blew through the script. “And I felt warm and cozy reading it,” she says. “That feeling I used to get in high school, when I saw my first rom-com love stories — and yet it felt almost too real in a way that was exciting.”
Netflix was desperate for Bell to star, but first she wanted to be sure Foster was really okay with her stepping into the role. “I didn’t want there to be any bad blood,” she says. “And knowing that Erin wrote this for herself and was out there selling it for herself, and then I became a linchpin, it was only appropriate that I have an honest side conversation with her.” But Foster insisted she was good with the plan; in fact, she told Bell that staying behind the scenes would allow her to have the show move forward and have a baby at the same time.
So, Bell signed on — the first one in the cast to do so — and in the months that followed, she studied Foster closely. “I watched her way more than she knew,” she says, noting how she also saved images of Foster’s various looks and tacked them up on the walls of her hair and makeup room as inspiration. She jokes: “It was full Single White Female.”
Jackie Tohn was at Bell’s house when her best friend and the other producers happened to be discussing potential actors to play Rabbi Noah. Tohn, a self-described “Jew from New York,” who was later cast as Noah’s sister-in-law Esther, couldn’t help but weigh in. “I’m like, ‘Okay, you got your Max Greenfield, but he might be a little old,’” she remembers saying, “‘You got your Skylar Astin, but he might be a little young. You got your [Jason] Biggs, who plays Jewish but isn’t. And then you got your Adam Brody, who’s obviously going to be the tippy top.’”
Indeed, Brody was Bell’s first and only pick to play opposite her. In fact, she even threw together a reel of their previous work in Showtime’s House of Lies and the 2013 film Some Girls to showcase their chemistry. “I was like, ‘Trust me, Adam knows how to stare dopily at someone and so do I, and that’s kind of all you need,’” she says. “I mean, I’d love to tell you that it’s real. It’s not. We both just know how to do it.”
So, they sent Brody the script, and he agreed to a meeting with Foster. He had questions about where the show was headed, many of which Foster couldn’t answer. Still, she was charming, and so was the script. “I was like, ‘Well, fuck it,’” says Brody. “‘I really like her, I like this episode and I love Kristen and it’s Netflix and there’s a lot of reasons to just roll the dice.’” So, he signed on, then threw himself into prep.
Brody went to a Shabbat service and devoured a collection of relevant books, podcasts and films. Later, he’d pick up a few pointers from one of the rabbis who worked at a temple the show filmed in. Despite early talk of having a rabbi on hand to help him — the writers consulted at least one — the only other rabbi that Brody interfaced with was a dad at his kid’s school. Asked if that dad’s world had been positively rocked by the show’s portrayal of rabbis — or, specifically, Brody’s “hot rabbi” — the actor laughs. “No, he plays it pretty cool,” Brody says, “but I like to think it has.”
Tohn has been best friends with Bell for more than two decades, so the actress was already aware of the project when her reps sent her audition sides for Noah’s ex Rebecca. But Bell nixed that plan. “Jackie and I go on a hike and she says, ‘I’m reading for Rebecca!’ And I said, ‘Bitch, you are not a Rebecca,’” recounts Bell. “I’m like, ‘Rebecca’s supposed to be soft. You’re, like, not soft. Tell your agents you want the sides for Esther.’”
Tohn knew enough to trust her friend. “But in my brain, I’m giggling, because I’m not Kristen Bell,” she says. “I don’t tell my team shit. I get the auditions I get, I go on the auditions I get and I generally don’t book them.” Not so here. She waited for Esther, who was merely a recurring guest star during season one, and landed it. “It’s maybe once or twice in a career where you say to yourself, ‘Who else is going to do this?’” she says. “Because most of the time, 99.9 percent of the time, it’s not you — you can try it, you can play it, but it’s not you. But this one I knew in my kishkas.”
Foster, for her part, was just relieved to see how well-suited Tohn actually was for the role. “Kristen had said, ‘My best friend Jackie is a really talented actress,’ and we were all like, ‘Oh God, this is going to be awful for us because she’s not going to be good,’” Foster recalls. “She didn’t put any pressure on us, but the pressure is implied, and Kristen’s literally the person who’s reading off camera with her in her audition. Thankfully, Jackie was the best audition— she just was inherently who we had in our minds for this character.”
Lupe was coming off a buzzy run on Succession when she was asked to do a chemistry read with Bell. If she landed the part, she’d be playing Bell’s on-screen sister, Morgan, who’s loosely modeled after Foster’s sister, Sara. Almost immediately, Lupe began studying Sara’s Instagram and listening to the Foster sisters’ podcast, The World’s First Podcast, to get a sense for both her style and cadence. For the audition, she wore a pair of jeans from Favorite Daughter, the Foster sisters’ clothing line, and a black turtleneck, just as Sara might.
There was a time early on when Erin and Sara had considered starring in the show themselves. But once Bell was cast, at Netflix’s insistence, Sara thought better of it. “We’re in the business of things being made,” she says. “And of things being as great as they can be.” So, Lupe landed the role, and while Netflix boss Ted Sarandos has allegedly said he can barely tell the women apart, Sara says, “Justine has turned it into something so much more interesting and multifaceted than me.”
To hear Lupe tell it, the role has proven career-altering, and she’s grown exceptionally close to Bell in the process. The on-screen sisters went to visit the season two writers room ahead of filming, and Lupe couldn’t believe how much she was being given to do. “I’ve never been given this level of real estate as an actor in my entire career,” she says, tearing up as she continues: “It’s a show about Kristen and Adam and their character’s romance, so I was shocked that they were giving so much to me. It’s the biggest gift I’ve ever received, and I don’t take it lightly.”
Like Lupe, Simons came in for a chemistry read. He and Brody share an agent, and had met each other at least a few times — but now they would need to see how they’d pair as brothers. The answer, it turns out, is well, which was immediately clear to Brody. “We had some great guys read for the brother character but Adam felt like he was his best and funniest with Tim, which was important to listen to,” says Foster, who hardly needed convincing.
Simons, who’d spent several years on Veep, felt natural acting opposite Brody as well. “Adam’s a very easy guy to play off of,” he says, “and it was fun right away for each of us to try things.” The two have grown close off-screen, too, as Simons has with Lupe, with whom his character shares a very vague, very sexually charged relationship. In fact, he and Lupe leaned on each other often, especially in those anxiety-fueled moments early on. There was one, in particular, just after the actors had screened an early cut of the pilot episode together.
“Justine and I collapsed like a house of cards in the parking lot, like, ‘Are we fucking muppets? Are we the broadest idiots that have ever lived?’” he says. “I mean, I was saying, ‘Justine, no, you’re incredibly good in this and I’m an absolute piece of shit’; and she was like, ‘No, actually, you’re doing fine, I look like I’m in fucking Labyrinth.’”
The critics, on the other hand, seemed to wholly disagree. In fact, they couldn’t get enough of either — and were even more interested in them together. “I know, but we’re all our own worst critics,” Simons concedes. “And comedy’s fucking hard.”
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Read THR’s cover story Everybody Wants This!: How a Netflix Rom-Com Went From Near Implosion to Cultural Obsession.
